The invention is in the field of mail sorting and particularly pertains to that aspect of sorting handled by the mail carrier before leaving on his route. Currently, the routeman has a rack with about four levels, each rack being perhaps four feet wide. There are a number of dividers slightly more than an inch apart in each rack, and at the bottom of the forward edge of the racks is a label identifying the space between each rack with a house number on a street. Thus, half a rack might represent one side of one street in the postman's route.
When the delivery man receives his unsorted mail, he proceeds to sort it between the divider blades in his racks so that each pair of blades contains therebetween the mail intended for one house or business. After the mail is all sorted, the mailman takes down the mail by pulling out each batch separately from between the respective dividers, and then grouping them together, undivided, in large groups of perhaps two dozen or more delivery stop. Thus, although the divider blades are necessary to permit the mailman to sort the mail initially, they become a liability when he takes down the mail for grouping and banding because he must individually pull out the mail pieces from between each set of blades.
In addition to the time lost in individually pulling down these small groups of mail, there is also a tendency for "sleepers", small pieces of mail that do not come down with the group, to be left up in the rack. These sleepers may stay there for several days before they are discovered. Thus, there is a definite need for some type of apparatus which would easily separate whole groups of mail from the dividers without having to separate it all individually.
At least three different devices have been invented directed towards solution of this problem. The first invention, having U.S. Pat. No. 1,030,317, utilizes removable dividers which are simply pulled free of the mail rack. However, in this day and age, there are ordinarily many blade pairs which have mail literally jammed between them, so that in a situation utilizing removable blades of the type shown in this patent, often times the mail would come free with the dividers.
Another separating device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,217,973 issued in 1917. This suffers from the same drawback mentioned above, that is in modern times there is ordinarily too much mail to enable such a kilm system to work. Also, different size pieces would flip upwardly due to the wire construction of the flip-up bars in this last mentioned device.
The third device, the subject of U.S. Pat. No. 1,593,326, most closely approaches applicant's invention by utilizing a number of blades which remain within the rack of the sorting device and have trays which pull out forwardly with the mail therein. However, this device also appears to be impractical in today's world because first, the divider blades of that invention pivot upwardly, and to pull a two-foot or four-foot tray full of mail out against the resistence of dozens of pivoted dividers would be obviously inconvenient. Also, a lot of today's letters contain bulky objects such as pencils, and the upward pivot motion of the separators would snag on the bulky protrusion and jamb the letters against the bottom of the above shelf. Further, the back bar of that invention probably would not serve to stop all pieces of mail, as it only catches the mail at the bottom and not near the top where it must be to be effective, so that some would be left inside the rack after the sorting tray had been pulled forward.
There is thus a need for a simple, inexpensive, lightweight apparatus to facilitate mail sorting as thus described.